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Saturday, 7 September 2013

Wild Strawberries - Sweet as Saccharine...

The
Leslies, who star in Angela Thirkell’s
Wild Strawberries, lead a charmed life in their beautiful ancestral home,
cared for by faithful servants, and looked up to by local villagers. There is
no shortage of cash, no nastiness, no rain, and everything is bathed in a
golden glow. It’s all as sweet as saccharine and as frothy as cappuccino, but very
enjoyable nonetheless, although it did leave me feeling a need to read something
with a little more bite and substance.

First
published in 1934 (a year after High Rising, which seemed sharper, and which I
love unreservedly), it portrays the kind of world that Thirkell knew. It’s hard
to imagine that world now, with its strict social codes and class structures
and the deference of working folk towards those higher up the scale. For
example, I’ll bet you wouldn’t find a local vicar these days hanging on to
start his service until the arrival of the local gentry, but that’s just what
happens here. Not only that, but when the Leslies do arrive (late), scatty Lady
Emily takes a long time to settle herself and her family, and she continues to
talk to them throughout the service.

Lady
Emily, who heads three generations of Leslies, is delightfully dotty. Vague and
forgetful, she is constantly in a muddle, always mislaying her possessions and getting
hold of the wrong end of the stick in conversations. She is always drawing up
complicated plans to organise the lives of her family, servants, visitors and
villagers, in the belief the belief that she is helping them – but everyone
ignores her efforts and goes their own way, just as they have always done. The
blurb on the back of my copy (Virago, 2012), describes her as a matriarch,
which I always think implies a woman of great force and determination, and Lady
Emily is neither. She may interfere, but since no-one takes any notice, she
does no harm, and she is incapable of imposing her will on others – indeed, for
much of the time she seems to have little will of her own, fluttering from idea
to idea, and from one activity to another, without ever settling. But she’s so warm
and friendly, and kind and caring, that it’s impossible not to like her.

Her
husband is much quieter and calmer, who tolerates his wife’s idiosyncrasies, and
is occasionally exasperated by her actions, but the relationship between them
is actually quite touching. We don’t see a lot of him, and we don’t see a lot
of the two of them together, but there is genuine affection between them, and
they still grieve for the loss of their eldest son in the First World War, and
appear to support each other in their loss.

Their
family comprises surviving sons John, a steady, hardworking widower, and idle,
feckless David, who has an eye for a pretty girl but no intention of settling
down, and their beautiful, placid daughter Agnes, as well as her three young
children, and grandson Martin who, as the son of the dead eldest son, will
inherit the estate.

Then
there’s the servants: Nannie, Ivy the nursemaid, Macpherson the agent, Gudgeon the
butler, Conque, Lady Emily’s French maid (universally known as Conk), and
various others who make brief appearances but have no role to play in the
story. And there’s a full cast of other characters, including the vicar; the Boulles
(a French family who have hired his home for the summer); assorted villagers,
and one of David’s friends, highly educated, cold-hearted Miss Stevenson, one
of the few women to hold a responsible job in radio.

Wild
Strawberries also features Mr Holt, a social parasite who spends his life
sponging off the rich and famous, inviting himself to stay at their comfortable
homes, and to be ferried around by their chauffeurs, enjoying their food and
drink, demanding the attention he feels he deserves. He has built a reputation
as a gardening expert (although he has no garden of his own) and it was this
expertise which provided his opening into society, when he was younger and
wittier than he is now. Thirkell gives us a rather cruel – and sad – picture of
an ageing man, a bore and a sponger, who is no longer welcomed by people he
thought were friends.

And,
of course, there is pretty Mary Preston, the kind-hearted, penniless niece of
Agnes’ husband, who has been invited to Rushwater (the family estate) for the
summer, and promptly becomes infatuated with David, although Lady Emily and
Agnes think she would make an ideal wife for John…

Novelist Angela Thirkell.

The
plot, such as it is, is not strong. It’s another of those novels where not a
lot happens, and the focus is very much on the small, everyday things in life,
and the relationships between the characters, but that’s very much the kind of
novel I always enjoy. Here the portrayal of the life led by the landed gentry
in the early 1930s is superb, and there are some brilliant cameo portraits of
the lesser characters, like the horrendous, overbearing Madame Boulle, who is
convinced that everything French is best, and that she is always right (she
reminded me of the German girl who once stayed with us on an inter-school exchange,
with the difference, of course, that our little fraulein believed Germany
reigned supreme).

In
his introduction (which I looked at after I completed the novel), Alexander
McCall Smith) compares Wild Strawberries to a Noel Coward play. Personally, I
don’t think Thirkell is as witty as Coward, but as I can see what he means,
because much of the dialogue is very mannered and stylised, and as I read I
could see the story unfolding before me like a Merchant Ivory film.

2 comments:

I have all the books and High Rising is my favourite, along with Summer Half. I find Lady Emily irritating and she never changes at all through the whole long series. However much I criticise the books, Thirkell remains one of my top favourite authors of light fiction.

I can quite see that Lady Emily could become irritating, but it was hard not to like her, and this was such an enjoyable read. I'm more than happy to read it again, and to find more of Thirkell's work.